Reimagining the Bioreactor
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(The Making of the Atom Bomb: Richard Rhodes)
- Chaim Weizmann, then Manchester University, subsequently the president of Israel, on his method of using B-Y Bacteria to "brew" acetone. This very probably single-handedly ended a materiels supply crisis for shell explosives, affected the conduct of WW1 and led directly in turn to the post-war politics of Palestine and the nascent state of Israel.
>...gin factory in Bow, London, so industrial scale production of acetone could begin in six British distilleries requisitioned for the purpose in early 1916. The effort produced 30,000 tonnes of acetone during the war...
Evidently, he delivered exactly the amount Churchill requested. That is an incredible feat to go from bench to industrial scale within a couple of years. Was there any other putative process on the table at the time or was the entire acetone effort dependent upon scaling up Weizmann's process?
The production of butanol by biological means was first performed by Louis Pasteur in 1861.[5] In 1905, Austrian biochemist Franz Schardinger found that acetone could similarly be produced.[5] In 1910 Auguste Fernbach (1860–1939) developed a bacterial fermentation process using potato starch as a feedstock in the production of butanol.[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetone%E2%80%93butanol%E2%80%...
Methanol, Ethanol and Acetic acid (vinegar) production probably were the only precursor methods of bio reactor well understood.
Penicillin which was significant in WW22 was industrialised at scale by Du Pont and the USDA in Peoria using bioreactors. the British method (Ernest Chain Howard Florey), demanded huge surface area mould growing, in semi-open trays based on bedpans, which is what they jury-rigged in the lab for the first production cycles. du Pont took it and ran with it.
Leonard Bickel's biography of Florey has quite a lot about the industrialisation of production in bioreactors.
If you want another good story about them, read up on Quorn, and why it was invented and how Fusarium was bred up in bioreactors to try and make protein at scale. It was Lord Rank (the naked man banging the gong at the front of movies... No thats not Lord Rank, (it was his movie company) but it should be) who pushed for this, concerned about Soylent-green futures
As I was reading this article, I started thinking, "what we really need is a surface area you can extract and expand", and the image of a roll of corrugated material came into my head. It's a lot of surface area in a cylindrical space, and when unwound you have substantial access to the surface. No nooks and crannies that you can't reach with a simple tool.
The other route to go is what the pool industry does, which is to 'shock' the system, which essentially means to poison the microbes in such a way that they fall into suspension and you can filter them out (possibly with a separate filter so you don't foul the standard one). But that shuts the whole system down for some time. Not a showstopper if you can rotate out reactors, but I think you'd be better off with a replaceable parts mentality, swapping out parts for maintenance and cleaning and bringing the system online faster.
This is more land efficient than growing plants.
Some people used carbon capture to carbonate the water.
Algae are much more efficient for various reasons. Or rather, the efficiency ceiling is higher, whether it is realized is a separate question.
They make better use of space (your culture may vary).
They can have a higher proportion of their mass as oil or protein (relevant if you're harvesting them for food).
They are highly adaptable, they can acclimate themselves to new environments readily.
They are simpler and lack the "overhead" of vascular plants.
Relatedly, on paper at least it's a very nice system to engineer. You've got a logistic growth curve (a sigmoid) for biomass in suspension, and you're harvesting when you get to the flat part of the curve to "rewind" to the exponential part of the curve, so you're staying in the part which is very productive. Biomass is difficult to measure, but there are good proxies for it (such as pH, optical density, or conductivity).
You can get many harvests in a year, you may be able to harvest them every day or every week depending on conditions (I've worked in an algae farm that harvested every day during the summer and occasionally in the off season [though technically it was cyanobacteria, which some don't count as algae, it's kind of a Pluto situation]). Vascular plants I think are usually harvested 1 to 3 times a year (though I won't discount someone clever being able to get more harvests by harvesting sap or something like that).
I'm not an expert here but I've done a lot of reading on this.
My understanding is that people really don't have a hard time growing algae, it's just that algae doesn't make very good fuel.
This is evidenced, IMHO, by the vast number of companies that started as algae fuel producers and then pivot to algae supplement companies.
This article goes more in depth on the topic [0].
"One of the biggest challenges was that wild strains of algae couldn’t deliver the high levels of lipids needed to produce large quantities of fuel, said Todd Peterson, the former CTO of Viridos, Exxon’s longstanding and now former algae research partner."
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/17/big-oil-...
Food supplements are a much higher ticket item than fuel. It's a lot easier to make money that way. But you're right, pivoting to some kind of food product is a cliche.
Or you could not do any of that and press your dry algae into a pill and sell it at a high margin. As far as the profit motive goes, it just doesn't add up. So the dream dies on the vine.
I'd love to see the government pour money into this and build a plant that operated this way at a loss, on a sort of Apollo project basis; it wouldn't necessarily make financial sense, but we'd generate a bunch of great technology which would be applicable in many areas, and eventually it just might work. I think it's worth a shot to see if we can sustainably meet our food and fuel needs, maybe even in a carbon negative manner. But sadly I think we're going in a different direction.
As someone once put it, “oil is so plentiful we can afford to set it on fire”. Finding something else we can set on fire will be difficult, but it might be better to pyrolyze it directly and feed electricity into the power grid. The waste heat from the heat engine could be used in a heat exchanger to dry the algae before firing.
Speaking of power, the cooling effect of photosynthesis is also an underexplored areas.
Cover millions of acres of marginal/desert soil with sheets of algal mesh built for moisture retention. Plant trees or crops into it.
That it can't be burnt and turned back into CO2 seems like a positive, not a negative.
Oh, it doesn't make money? I guess that's the rub.
I wonder how hard it would be to make such an "algal mat". I would use something like this around here on my little farm/vineyard even as a kind of weed block, alternative to "plastic mulch": rolls of algal-produced fibrous mats, 2" or so thick. Permeable so water and air can get through, but thick and tight enough that weeds get blocked out. Would just degrade or be tilled into soil over time.
There's already equipment out there for laying "plastic mulch" but the stuff itself is fairly controversial because even the biodegradable stuff is still a plastic. If one could economically produce such a thing made out of algae, and compete with plastics on cost, that would be pretty damned nifty.
That and just some kind of bulk powder that can be soil incorporated as a carbon amendment. Pay farmers to lay the stuff down in huge quantities as a way of improving soil while getting CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Even better if a bioreactor and related equipment to make this stuff could be made to operate locally on site.
In my opinion, microalgae production for bulk purposes (i.e. biofuels rather than current pharma usages) has thus far failed because the existing cultivation systems are very energy intensive (pumps), labour intensive (cleaning), and inconsistent (cell growth and lipid concentrations are more or less non-deterministic). This all means that the cost of production is higher than what you can sell the raw output for in most cases.
Our novel approach was to engineer growth media aerosols (100 micron diameter microdroplets), and suspend microalage cells inside each microdroplet. Then we made a literal cloud (microdroplet air suspension) inside an environmentally controlled greenhouse volume. Doing this enables an extremely large surface area contact between the growth media and atmosphere (also CO2 enriched atmosphere), as well as energy efficient mixing and circulation processes. Our calculations showed that orders of magnitude energy efficiency improvements are possible compared to existing cultivation systems (raceways, tubular PBRs), and additionally scaling is inherently possible due to the ease of building out larger and larger volumes to contain such microdroplet atmospheric suspensions.
Existing systems cannot be effectively scaled due to e.g. pressure limitations associated with tall water volumes, risks of culture contamination, light penetration etc.
A core takeaway from our investors is that we should have tried harder to demonstrate strong market pull for our reactors, or the microalgae itself. In this respect it was a kind of chicken and egg problem, in that microalgae can be used for many different things, but no one is doing it because it is too expensive, and the existing markets are supply saturated.
I was also very bullish on cellulosic biofuels from switchgrass. Just mow the prairies (don't disturb the soil).
I'd love to know why I was wrong. Too soon? Like GM's EV1? Little potential for Wright's Law (learning curve) to drive down costs?
> corrugated material
Very interesting. I hope someone tries this.
That said, all the (huge scale) biofuel options will likely be mooted by green hydrogen. Fingers crossed.
> The bioreactor was designed for the chemistry industry.
Bioreactors are talked about a lot in homesteading. If you want to re-image it that would be a nice start.
Every house not on town sewerage has a bioreactor and dams are natural bioreactors, there are products to mange these, but they are not tested - https://www.amazon.com/Splosht-Large-Fishpond-Water-Feature/...
It'd be interesting to see a bioreactor for more general waste, like wood and plant matter.
> antimalarial drug precursors
I'm dubious if big pharma has a problem with this it hasn't solved it.
Is that what a compost bin is?